On Feudalism and Obligation

 It has been a while since I did something specifically gaming-related, so I am returning to that topic.  Today, I will be discussing the Obligation Hindrance in Savage Worlds.  Of course, nothing I do is simple, so I will be approaching this through multiple lenses.  The difficulty with multiple lenses is that some part will always be in sharp focus, and some part will be distorted, but this is a subject where multiple interests of mine coincide.

As written, the Obligation Hindrance is, like most Savage Worlds Hindrances, deliberately vague about what is exactly implied.  This allows it to be applied across a variety of circumstances.  Some settings, such as Deadlands, have a little more information - a Major Obligation is effectively a full-time job; a Minor Obligation is a part-time job (at least in terms of what we think of as work hours; the truth is a little more complicated in pre-20th Century settings).  The example given is military rank: Officers take a Major Obligation; Enlisted and NCOs a Minor.  This is actually a remarkably elegant way of handling the social obligations of an officer in the 19th Century, who is expected to be a gentleman as well as a soldier.

In return, the soldier gets pay, access to resources and connections, and the potential backing of the entire organization.  Historically, this meant that the frontier Army was willing to back up even officers who made obviously bad decisions - and no, I'm not thinking of Custer, while he made mistakes, his decision-making process was based on a decade of frontier experience and the innate daring of cavalry officers, but rather of the Fetterman Fight, where an officer's arrogance led to the loss of a platoon of soldiers and triggered Red Cloud's War.  At the other end of the frontier, the Army also stuck with the Bosque Redondo experiment right up until no less a hawk than General Sherman came in person and saw that it was an utter failure, at which time, to his credit, he tried, within his limits, to make whole with the Dine on the entire disaster.  In both cases, the Obligation ran both ways - the soldier owed service; in return, the service owed support.

This leads to a critical point about Obligations, and why the SCA and philosophy tags are on this post.  An Obligation without any sort of return on it is simply slavery by another name.  There may be many reasons for such a set of circumstances - "I gave my word" is a common one in fiction - but that's different from an Obligation.  A life debt, such as the Chewbacca-Solo relationship, or, to really change gears, the Silver-Kreese relationship in the Karate Kid/Cobra Kai universe, has an inherent return in that one character's life literally depended on the other at one point.  Even so, such an Obligation tends to become wearing if it is treated casually.

To illustrate this point, I will use two different examples.  First is William Marshal, "the greatest knight who ever lived."  Second is Akechi Mitsuhide, who was not the greatest knight who ever lived.  Both of these men actually existed, which makes them more useful than fictional examples like Lancelot, because fictional examples can always do what the author tells them regardless of how stupid that decision is (looking at you, Lancelot).  Let's talk about Marshal first.

For those of you who do not know his story, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was a second son of a minor court functionary under William the Conqueror, whose youth was spent in the Anarchy, a period of civil war that followed the Conqueror's dynasty failing.  As a young man, he was fostered and knighted in Normandy, a region where from about 1000 to about 1200 there was a pretty much constant state of low-level civil war driven by the prickly pride and constant jockeying for position of Norman barons.  The divided fealty of Normandy between the kings of England and France didn't hurt, either.  This was an age where tournaments were basically NFL Draft - knights were there to show off their combat skills, with a battlefield rather than showmanship focus, and the best of them were recruited by varying competing lords.  In this milieu, if the pun will be forgiven, William Marshal, big, strong, long-limbed and hungry, drew the attention of Henry II of England, and was appointed as his son Henry the Young King's tutor at arms.

The Young King fed and clothed Marshal for thirteen years; they had their ups and downs, and in the last years of the Young King's life, there is evidence that Marshal made himself odious to young Henry somehow.  However, his service as tutor, tournament captain, knight, and companion in arms was rewarded as best the Young King could, for his father kept him on a fairly short financial leash.  Twice young Henry rose against his father; twice Marshal was there, as he was sworn to the young Henry, not the elder... yet.  In the second doomed rising, as young Henry's health failed, Marshal acted as his rearguard, even though the cause was clearly doomed.  At this moment, young Henry's followers were streaming away from him, into old Henry's service, almost as quickly as the Young King's dysentery-wracked frame was shedding weight.  William Marshal, however, stayed loyal to the man who had paid and clothed him for more than a decade - he had taken the coin, and he would stick to it.

Marshal's subsequent career followed this pattern.  There is absolutely no question that he could be a grasping, greedy man; the next king he served, the Young King's father Henry II, sarcastically said as much during summoning Marshal to the war wherein he became the only man known ever to unhorse Richard the Lionheart.  On the other hand, wealth was regarded as a sign of God's favor, and Marshal grew up in a time of deep uncertainty; craving a heritage to pass down to his children was an understandable flaw.  At the same time, he was loyal to the king from whom he held his lands; he was known as such a stable, trustworthy man that when Richard became king, he made Marshal one of the four justiciars of England in his absence.  When Richard died, Marshal's loyalty, both personal and to the idea that civil wars were bad, was to John, Richard's brother, and when the Barons' War culminated in the signing of the Magna Carta, Marshal, now Earl of Pembroke, was on John's side, but was regarded as a fair broker by both sides.  When, after the death of John, other barons made moves to overthrow his son, they knew that Marshal, now in his sixties, would be a huge influence on the decisions of other landowners.  When they approached him, his response was to tell them "If I have to carry him upon my back from island to island, and pay his way from my own purse, until he is given his rights, I will do so."  At the age of seventy, he was in the very first rank of men at Lincoln, forgetting even his helm in his determination to serve the third Henry of his life.

William Marshal was, as I have said elsewhere, no ordinary knight.  There were many who, in his position, felt that their obligations had been fulfilled to a series of men, either because they were no longer capable of paying, or because of their tyranny, or because of their youth.  What made Marshal different was that, even if he was a greedy, land-hungry man like many knights of his age, he took his obligation seriously; if he could once ignore an obligation once given, he could do it again.  He therefore did not ignore those obligations - whether they were to his lands in Wales and Leinster, where he spent a small fortune on improvements, or to his various lords, where he spent years in service with the expectation that his service would be rewarded.  Even when he knew he was serving a bad king, such as John, he served with the understanding that he had taken the coin, and therefore he owed an obligation.

Let us talk now about a very different approach to obligation - what happens when an obligation is tested to its breaking point?

Akechi Mitsuhide is famous today in Japan mostly for his betrayal of Oda Nobunaga.  He lived from 1528 to 1582; while the circumstances of his early life are relatively obscure, he was apparently viewed as a trustworthy enough man that he was appointed as one of the guardians of the wandering Ashikaga Yoshiaki, younger brother to the last effective shogun of the Ashikaga line, and the person who Yoshiaki turned to in extremis to decide who could best support his claim.  Mitsuhide suggested Oda Nobunaga, at the time an ambitious, unorthodox warlord in the hilly regions between Kyoto and the Kanto plain.  Nobunaga leapt at the opportunity to expand his own influence, and with his support, Yoshiaki was installed as the last Ashikaga shogun in 1568.  He proved both an ineffectual ruler in his own right, and resistant to being Nobunaga's puppet, and became a focal point for anti-Oda forces, so just as he had once been installed, Yoshiaki was removed from office by Oda Nobunaga in 1573.  By now, Akechi Mitsuhide had transferred his service to Oda Nobunaga, even receiving permission to build Sakamoto Castle in 1571 - a signal honor from Nobunaga, who never fully trusted his subordinates.  However, at the same time, Nobunaga, a man infamous even in his own day for his eccentric behavior, rewarded with one hand and insulted with the other.  Mitsuhide's mother, or possibly aunt, was given as a hostage by Nobunaga... who promptly violated the treaty she was hostage for.  Nobunaga once threw a priceless set of Mitsuhide's Chinese dinnerware into the castle pond because another man (Tokugawa Ieyasu, supposedly - whose own career is a fascinating study in lip service to obligation when in service, and absolute enforcement of it when in power) complained about the quality of the meal.  Nobunaga once publicly kicked Mitsuhide, one of his most successful generals, for a perceived lack of sincerity in praising their allies after a battle.

After all of these provocations, Akechi Mitsuhide reached a breaking point.  He had been lavishly rewarded by Nobunaga, with an income of 550,000 koku (theoretically, the amount of rice needed to support one person for a year) and a half-dozen castles held in fief from Nobunaga, but at the same time his service had cost him the life of his close kin, he felt insulted and underappreciated, and there is reason to believe that Nobunaga was planning on stripping him of his lands.  Additionally, he was by all indicators a conservative supporter of the Ashikaga and of the imperial court, and Nobunaga was not conservative, overthrew the Ashikaga, and routinely disparaged the imperial court in private as a useless relic.  Thus the combination of personal and ideological reached a boiling point in 1582.  When Nobunaga stopped at Honno-ji for the night in May 1582, Mitsuhide sent a general signal to his forces: The enemy is at Honno-ji.  They assaulted the temple complex, burned it to the ground, and Nobunaga died there, though the exact circumstances of his death in the burning temple remain a mystery.

The point of this exercise is that obligation must go both ways; even when it is manipulated to string someone along - such as Marshal's wedding to Isabel de Clare being delayed by Richard the Lion-Heart as long as he could squeeze something out of it - it cannot be used as a source of deliberate provocation.  Nobunaga's approach of "I'm the lord, you are the servant" was forgivable under limited circumstances but there reached a point in Mitsuhide's career where it quit being the Fool of Owari acting the fool, and deliberate provocation to see just how far his loyal general would go.  When he learned that limit, it proved to be more than he had bargained for.

To circle back to the beginning, though - in role-playing terms, whether that is in the SCA or in tabletop RPGs, obligations, such as squire to knight or knight to Crown, an Obligation comes with requirements on both sides of the obligation.  Generally in the SCA those obligations lay fairly light on us, but they are a critical consideration in any relationship.  The impetus for this conversation was Dave Lowry's Persimmon Wind, again, in its discussion of how hard it is to become a student, formal or informal, of a sensei.  That is because that relationship incurs obligations in both directions, and it is vital to both members of the bargain that each of them not find their obligations to the other too odious.  Especially in the school of thought where the master's power is in some ways absolute, it is important that the student understand and accept that, and that the master be capable of not abusing the relationship.  This struck me as very similar to the SCA process of establishing a household, and also how an Obligation, in RPG terms, get incurred voluntarily... from both sides.

(Yes, yes, I realize I've just spent several hundred words defining the Social Contract... but the Social Contract is abstract; a feudal contract follows the basic same rules but is very personal for both sides of the coin, because the obligations are expressed in terms of "I will," not "one should.")